Marc Maron defines what he does as “comedy of introspection and personal struggle.” He obsesses over other comics who get network shows or on the cover of magazines, where he feels he belongs. He describes himself as an “abusive, selfish, needy, angry a-hole” who is “bitter and misunderstood.” But with all his complaining, he’s doing very well. He travels the country doing stand-up. His half-million listeners make his WTF podcast one of the most successful on the Internet. His IFC show Maron is in its second year. He’s written a successful memoir, Attempting Normal. And he’s enormously popular with people in their late 20s and 30s who can relate to his rants.

The Saturday Evening Post: In your book you write that you grew up in an emotionally crippling household. Is that the fuel that fed your desire to become a stand-up comedian?

Marc Maron: My father was erratic and absent. My mother was self-consumed. She and I fought a lot. She was very obsessed with her appearance and with weight and her own place in life and who she was. A lot of that was projected onto me. Most of my concerns as a child were how fat I was getting and what pant size I was going to wear and how embarrassed I would be about my mother’s behavior, her peculiar eating habits, her weird vanity, her sexuality. She never did anything right — like pick me up on time. It was always embarrassing. So I often sought negative attention just to get attention. Humor was something I used when I wasn’t paralyzed with discomfort or not feeling like I fit in.

SEP: Your early career was a struggle. People didn’t “get” you. What made you continue on when it must have been so tough along the way?

MM: Once I started defining my comic personality, it was aggressive. I wanted to provoke, to make people uncomfortable. I believe life is fundamentally unfair. You reach almost daily, if you let yourself, a sense of futility. So raging against that was something I thought everyone could relate to. As it turned out, it’s a very fine line between raging and self-pity. And that’s not compelling. The struggle is to overcome that. Being self-effacing, on the other hand, is a popular comedic archetype: the shlub. But if you add anger and a sense of entitlement to that, it becomes repugnant. My curiosity, my humor, has always been driven by the fact that I was missing something. Or that someone else had figured something out that I hadn’t. Or why is it easier for that guy than for me? It really isn’t fundamentally easier for anybody — a lot of time luck or opportunity plays into it. Some people are luckier than other people. Some people deserve things other people don’t. It isn’t that complicated.

SEP: How did you eventually find your audience?

MM: What happened with me is I gave up. I had to assess who I was and realize that maybe I’m not going to be an important comic. Maybe I’m not going to get a TV show. That was heartbreaking. After being divorced twice and assessing the flaws that I had that hobbled me, I started thinking, Who the %$#& are you? So acknowledging that I had failed and not thinking of anything else I could do, I turned to this [making podcasts]. I can’t help but be raw and honest and this format lends itself beautifully to that. [The podcast] seems to have a profound effect on people. Ultimately, I wasn’t looking for money or to be a rock star, I was looking to be relevant and to be seen.

]]>Six months after Maurice Sendak died in May 2012, The Believer published an interview British journalist Emma Brockes had done with him. She asked him his opinion of e-books. “I hate them,” Sendak responded. “It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. … Even as a kid, my sister, who was the eldest, brought books home for me, and I think I spent more time sniffing and touching them than reading. I just remember the joy of the book, the beauty of the binding.” [Read the related article “A War on Writers?” by Steven Slon from the Jan/Feb 2015 issue.]

I know the feeling. I too grew up holding, fondling, and smelling books. When I got older I began collecting them. I’ve spent hundreds, probably thousands, of hours hunting down books of writers I’ve gotten to know. When I began writing books of my own, there was such a thrill to see them in print. I will never forget walking past the Madison Avenue Bookstore in Manhattan the week my Conversations with Capote was published in the winter of 1985. It was my first book. And there it was. It was, to say the least, a very special, very personal moment.

My books — my own, and all the others I’ve collected — mean a great deal to me. But I no longer hold the opinion Mr. Sendak did. I don’t hate e-books. I can’t, because my last seven books have been — I hate to admit — e-books.

When Ann Patchett, best-selling author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder, and the owner of an independent bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee, was asked her opinion of e-books, she said, “I care that you read, not how you read.”

I care too. I care very much. The 11 books I am currently reading weigh 19.5 pounds; in my Kindle they weigh zero — that alone makes a good case for e-reading.

“The recent contractions and consolidations in the publishing business — layoffs, dwindling sales and advances, mergers of houses once thought unassailable — have left a widespread sense of unease about the durability of books,” Giles Harvey wrote in a recent New Yorker article about why failed novelists turn to writing memoirs about their failures. “Reading in bed with his girlfriend, novelist Benjamin Anastas wonders if the rise of e-books ‘will help keep writing alive and well into the digitized future, or if my problems are an early warning that my profession is about to go extinct.’”

I don’t think books will go extinct. More precisely, it’s become a changing art. According to the book research firm Bowker, self-publishing now accounts for more than 458,564 books annually, with Amazon leading the way. E-books cannot be ignored. The new problem is how to separate the good from the bad and the ugly.

In the April 2013 Wired, Evan Hughes wrote, “After centuries in which books and the process of publishing them barely changed, the digital revolution has thrown the entire business up for grabs. It’s a transformation that began with the rise of Amazon as an online bookseller and accelerated with the resulting decline of the physical bookstore. But with the shift to e-books — which now represent upwards of 20 percent of big publishers’ revenue, up from 1 percent in 2008 — every aspect of the existing framework is now open to debate: how much books will cost, how long they’ll be. … The only certainty is that the venerable book business, a settled landscape for so long, is now open territory for anyone to claim.”

Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, expressed a similar sentiment. “Thanks to the Internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: Anyone can write, and everyone does, and beginners are expected to be the last pure philanthropists, giving it all away for the naches. It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer.”

It has always been hard to be a professional writer. And yes, it’s a lot harder today. When I started writing books, I received an advance from a publisher that allowed me enough time to write the book. It was never a great deal of money — I got $50,000 for the first book, and $215,000 was the most I ever got, but that book (The Hustons) took me three years to write. Thankfully I was able to supplement my income by writing for magazines, until that world began to shrink as well. So the challenge is to continue being a professional writer — i.e., a writer who makes a living from his writing — in an e-book, self-publishing world. That was the quandary for most of the writers I knew. The only way to find out was to jump in. If I wanted to write what I wanted to write — novels, satire, poetry, memoirs — I would have to test the waters by sticking my own feet in them. I made an investment in myself. And a deal with Amazon. Would it turn out to be a deal with the devil? Or with my savior?

I’m not alone. Name writers like Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and David Mamet have all put out e-book originals. But, as Bruce Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing warned, “Celebrity authors may have great luck self-publishing, but most authors are not famous.”

Amazon has added a new twist to this market by hiring an editor, David Blum, who carefully selects Amazon Singles, original works of 5,000 to 30,000 words of both nonfiction and fiction. He gets more than 1,000 submissions a month and has published 345 Singles in the first two years of the program. Approximately one-third of these have sold at least 10,000 copies, at an average of $2 per Single. As the writer gets 70 percent of this, it’s understandable why so many are trying to make the cut.

But the truth is, with every successful e-book writer’s story, there are hundreds of thousands of failures. “There are so many stories out there about people who have made it big self-publishing,” literary publicist Julia Drake told Publishers Weekly Select, a magazine devoted to self-publishing, “and there’s not enough out there about the 99 percent of the authors who’ve self-published a book and it disappears.” The only reality each writer faces is his own.

My first step was to spend $350 to digitize the four books of mine whose rights had been returned to me: Conversations with Capote, The Hustons, Conversations with Michener, Above the Line, and Conversations with Brando. Then I found out about Amazon’s White Glove Program, a program for established writers. If invited in, Amazon will take care of the business of digitizing your books and will work with you to get them ready for self-publication, pending your approval. I was invited to join that program. And then they told me about their Select program, where I would be “allowed” to offer any of my books for free to their readers for up to five days over three months. Why would I do that? I wondered. To raise my profile, I was told. The higher one’s profile, the better chance of gaining new readers. Freebies were designed to create word-of-mouth sales. And since I had more than one book, if a reader took one of my books for free, they might be encouraged to buy the others. Besides the four previously published books, I had seven others I was working on. My Amazon contact thought it would be a smart idea to release them all at the same time. Instead of putting out one book and waiting, I could put out all 11 books, so when someone went to my book page they could see all of them at once. But I was still some distance away from publishing. Before I could digitize them I needed my trusty copy editor to go over each and every paragraph. Once she was done, I needed to place the photos I wanted to include, to get permission to use illustrations and quotes, and to get each book cover designed. Once everything was in order, I gave the books to Amazon. When they said they were ready, I went over each of them and found problems that had to be fixed. That back and forth took a few more months. When it came time to click publish and see these books go public, I next had to think about how to market them. Because so many books go out into the electronic world each day, I was really just getting started. And this was the worst part of the process, because it meant letting all the people I knew, through email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, that these books were now available.

This was now my welcome to the real world of social networking. The world where all your friends, and “friends,” and former students send congratulations and encouragement and then go on with their busy lives. In other words, ignoring your pleas to buy your books. That’s when you begin to see the genius in Amazon’s free books idea. If they won’t purchase, then you can give them a taste, select one of the books, and nudge them to buy the others. So, I put up Capote first, and lo and behold, 2,000 people took it the first day. When sales of the other books remained meager, I offered them Brando for free. One thousand took that one. When no one was buying either of the novels, I put one up one month, the other the next. Four hundred people took them. Yoga? No! Shmoga!, my satire on yoga? I could barely give it away. How do I know how many people are buying, borrowing, or taking them for free? Because I can go to my reports on Amazon and check the month-to-date unit sales. Whereas before I had to wait six months to find out how any of my books were selling, now it is instant.

The first month, I earned over $600. The second, around $400. The third, under $200. It’s not exactly what I was selling in print. The Hustons had a 50,000 print run and supposedly sold 80 percent of those; I don’t have the figures of all the other books, but I do know that each of them sold at least in the four or five figures.

Stephen Marche, in Esquire, has pooh-poohed writers who whine about the terrible state of publishing today. He points out that “for writers starting out, there are more options, more means of access to the marketplace, than ever before.” And he quotes two pollsters (Gallup and Pew) who claim that the number of books the average American reads per year is 17. He says we’re in “the golden age for writers and writing.”

I agree that there are more options for writers today, but what Marche neglects to address is how many of these options allow a writer to actually earn a living from his writing. He points to how J.K. Rowling is richer than the queen of England and that Tom Wolfe got $7 million for his last novel, but there will always be writers who hit the literary lottery. It’s all the others in the game that Marche dismisses by saying “Everyone seems to understand and accept this golden age except the writers themselves.” Well, yes, the writers in the trenches. They don’t quite understand and accept. As for the average American reading 17 books a year? You’ve got to be kidding me. I know a lot of educated people. Very few of them read 17 books a year. Most people I know just read occasionally and watch a lot of TV. They can reference Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Seinfeld episodes, and Downton Abbey. But ask them what they thought of The Gravedigger’s Daughter or The Emperor of All Maladies and see if their eyes cross.

“It does seem a bit high,” said Joyce Carol Oates when I asked her what she thought about it. Oates is the only writer I know who can write 17 books a year. “Maybe these are self-help books and cookbooks,” she mulled.

Having taught gifted English majors at UCLA for 10 years, I’m pretty convinced that even they didn’t read much more than what they were assigned. It may be far easier for all of them, and for anyone else, to self-publish these days, but getting people to actually read these things? That’s a whole other story.

“My dad and I would play imaginary games, pitching to imaginary hitters, calling balls and strikes as we threw the ball back and forth. I think it’s the nicest memory I have of being with my dad.” Photo source: Shutterstock.com

Though I live in Los Angeles, my wife and I rarely venture into Beverly Hills. I have very little to look at in these posh palaces of luxury, and thankfully my wife, who is a weaver, prefers to make her own clothing. But she does like Coach bags, and there happens to be a Coach store on Rodeo Drive.

What surprised me when we looked at their window display was a baseball theme, with two-color bats and some multi-colored leather baseball gloves (orange/white, squash/fawn, navy/turquoise).

Inside, in the back of the store, is a small department for men. And sure enough, among the baseball beanbag paperweights and baseball-leather wallets, were some smooth leather baseball gloves that brought back a flood of childhood memories when I slid my hand into one. Good God, I thought, this was my Proustian madeleine.

I remembered Little League tryouts when I was 11 years old. The tryouts were meant to determine which boys would play in the Majors. I was a skinny kid, not very tall or strong, and I clearly belonged in the Minors; but when one of the coaches hit a fly ball to me, I chased it down in the outfield and somehow miraculously caught it. That ruined my chance to play much that summer.

I was put in the Majors, along with boys two and three years older than me where I sat on the bench, waiting to be tapped to pinch run or to play the last inning of a losing game. But still, a memory that I hold most dear is of that special catch during tryouts. The long run on the outfield grass, the hardball arcing over my head, my outstretched left arm, the ball landing in the deep pocket with a thwunk! and the look on everyone’s face when it didn’t drop out of my glove.

As my wife browsed bags, I tried on and pounded a stunning navy/turquoise leather glove. I remembered our junior varsity team in high school. I was 13, playing second base, and I convinced my dad that I needed a new infielder’s mitt. We went to a sporting goods store and I found a nice golden Spalding glove with the name Sam Esposito scrawled in the pocket. Esposito was a utility infielder for the Chicago White Sox in 1952, and from 1955–63. He had a lifetime batting average of .207 and hit just eight home runs in 10 years, so he wasn’t a major league ballplayer for his bat. His fielding percentage was .957. Esposito was a glove man.
I was a die-hard Yankee fan, so I didn’t really follow Sam Esposito, but I liked the glove and have never forgotten his name.

Nor have I forgotten when Mr. Morelli, our junior varsity head coach, decided to move me from second to first. “You need to get a first baseman’s mitt,” he told me. When I protested that I had just got my Sam Esposito infielder’s glove, he said, “You can’t be a first baseman with a glove like that. If you don’t get the right glove, I’ll have to bench you.” Those are cruel words to say to a fledgling ballplayer who had dreams of turning spectacular double plays and not fearing line drives. My dad had paid $29 for that glove. I knew I couldn’t tell him I needed another one, so I stuck to my guns and insisted I could play first base with the glove I had. Mr. Morelli stuck to his guns as well and put another kid at first.

This led to thoughts of my dad. Having a catch was one of the things we did in our backyard on weekends. He was a lefty, so he had an old mitt that couldn’t be passed down. We would play imaginary games, pitching to imaginary hitters, calling balls and strikes as we threw the ball back and forth. I think it’s the nicest memory I have of being with my dad. And just sticking a glove on my hand brought this back to me. If memory can be triggered so powerfully by something this simple, maybe it was worth forking over $348 to buy the glove.

To read the rest of this essay by Lawrence Grobel, pick up the July/August 2014 issue of The Saturday Evening Post on newsstands, or…

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]]>http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/06/20/in-the-magazine/features/having-a-catch.html/feed23 Questions for Harry Dean Stantonhttp://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/in-the-magazine/harry-dean-stanton.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/in-the-magazine/harry-dean-stanton.html#commentsThu, 17 Apr 2014 13:48:21 +0000http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/?p=93966The sad-eyed actor, never a star, has been in more movies—playing drifters, killers, or thieves—than you can probably count.

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, a documentary about the legendary character actor, has recently been released by Swiss filmmaker Sophie Huber. It’s an intimate portrayal of the man who was born in Kentucky in 1926, and went west to become a familiar face in such TV shows as Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel, Bat Masterson, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, The Fugitive, The Untouchables, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and HBO’s Big Love. Among his films are Cool Hand Luke; Alien; Repo Man; Paris, Texas; Pretty in Pink; The Godfather, Part II; The Last Temptation of Christ; and The Green Mile. In the documentary, David Lynch, Wim Wenders, Sam Shepard, Kris Kristofferson, and Deborah Harry talk about working with him, and Stanton responds to questions tersely. But the heart of the documentary is his singing, as he looks straight into the camera with his well-worn face and soulful eyes.

Question: You recently celebrated your 87th birthday—what have you learned, and have you given up any of the old vices?Harry Dean Stanton: That we’re not in charge of our lives and there are no answers to anything. It’s a divine mystery. Buddhism, Taoism, the Jewish Kabbalah—it’s all the same thing, but once it gets organized it’s over. You have to just accept everything. I’m still smoking a pack a day. I only drink when I go out, which is rarely. And I miss sex, which is down to hardly ever. But I’m in good shape. No problems yet.

Q: Was it Jack Nicholson who gave you your acting credo?HDS: Yeah. Be yourself and let the wardrobe do the character. [Laughs.] That was good. I’ve been doing it for over 50 years. I’m tired of movies. But I like to do it when I do it. The best directors leave you alone. They know when they hire you what you can do. I used to talk to Marlon Brando for hours on the telephone. He taught me a couple of Shakespeare monologues over the phone. Sometimes he’d hang up on me. Just screwing with me. He had a class he taught with young actors, and he had me teach it one time when he wasn’t there. I was his substitute teacher. What made Brando and Monty Clift so great was they played themselves. That’s what I do, too. It’s easy. No matter what I’m doing, I’m still Harry Dean Stanton. Even if you’re Olivier, you’re still yourself.

Q: How are you spending your days?HDS: I watch TV a lot. Game shows. The History Channel. Court TV. Biographies. Once in a while sports. I used to play poker but I stopped because I was in this game every week for a long time and I lost a whole lot of money—a couple of hundred thousand dollars over four years. I shouldn’t have played in it. I don’t think the game was all that straight. But it is what it is. There are no answers.

When Lisa Kudrow and the five other cast members of Friends decided to leave that show after its 10th season in 2004, they were giving up the most lucrative deal in TV history. For their last two seasons, they were each being paid a million dollars per episode. Yet, they agreed it was time to move on. Friends is syndicated around the world, so it seems those characters will never disappear from view, but Kudrow has done quite well for herself in the years since the show ended, as an innovative producer (Web Therapy and Who Do You Think You Are?), and before, as a versatile actor (The Opposite of Sex, Wonderland, and Analyze This).

Kudrow was born in Encino, California, on July 30, 1963. Her father is a retired doctor specializing in headache research. She has two older brothers, one, a neurologist, and her sister is a sculptor. Growing up, she was shy and felt awkward, and only started to blossom when she went off to study at Vassar. It was her intention to follow her father and brother into the medical profession, but then her brother’s best friend, Jon Lovitz, suggested she give improvisation a try, and once Kudrow hit the stage at The Groundlings, she was hooked. She went on countless auditions, with guest appearances on Cheers and Newhart, finally landing a small role as a waitress in Mad About You. That led to Friends and an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress in 1998. She married advertising executive Michel Stern in 1995, and they have a son, Julian, 15.

Question: You turned 50 in July. How did you celebrate that?Lisa Kudrow: Quietly.

Q: How old do you feel?LK: In my 40s.

Q: Three years ago you gave the commencement address at Vassar. What did you say that you wish someone had said to you when you graduated?LK: People who are 22 sometimes don’t listen. What I wanted to impart was that it’s going to be hard, but don’t let it get to you. You have to look at spinning disappointment into road signs. If something doesn’t work, go another way. You can’t take it personally.

Q: So your theme was don’t give up, because failure can lead to success. How much failure did you have to deal with yourself?LK: A lot, but I chose not to look at it that way. Every audition you don’t do well in, the job you didn’t get, you get into trouble when you start looking at it as failure. I try to be happy for everything that happens, the good and the bad. Otherwise I wouldn’t be right here.

Q: It seems like you’ve experienced more good than bad lately. Your show Web Therapy started as three-minute shorts on the Internet and was picked up as a series of half-hour episodes on Showtime. How did that start?LK: I was asked if I wanted to do a Web series and said no. But whenever I say absolutely not, I know that’s not rational. My brain just keeps on working on it anyway. So I thought if you were going to do a Web series, you should go straight into the storm, and make it about the Internet. I started thinking about things that people do on the Internet—people were revealing themselves, they were dating, doing intimate things really quickly, with not a lot of thought. And I thought, nothing could be a worse idea than to do therapy. That’s a funny idea, how people could go online and do a three-minute session with a so-called therapist and be able to say at work, “Yeah, I’m in therapy.” Then L Studio asked us if we had any ideas for a Web series, and we said, “There’s one thing we would do.” So then we had to figure out the details.

Q: Can you describe how you saw your character Fiona Wallice?LK: She doesn’t know much about therapy, and she’s not even accredited. So we made her really self-serving, judgmental, and not having to adhere to any rules of therapy. I’ve been in therapy but I’m not a trained therapist, so that’s perfect. [Laughs.]

Q: How did you manage to get people like Julia Louis-Dreyfus to play your sister, Lily Tomlin your scheming mother, Meryl Streep the guide to set your gay husband straight, Steve Carell as your boyfriend, and Meg Ryan as a happy hoarder?LK: In the beginning it was very hard. No one knew what it was. So we went to people we knew, like Bob Balaban and Jane Lynch, who had just shot the Glee pilot. Then Courteney Cox agreed to do it, which was a big deal. My co-producers are friends with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and she agreed to play my sister. Then we asked Lily Tomlin, and she had so many ideas, which took it to a higher level. We just said, “You’re in a psychiatric hospital” and she said, “That’s good. I want to have sock puppets and make socko drama.” And she came in with these sock puppets with wigs that matched her own wigs. Hilarious. Then I ran into Meryl Streep, and she said she’d love to do it. She’s just fantastic.

Q: When David Schwimmer’s character began to get too dark, did you have to stop filming and regroup?LK: No, we didn’t have to stop and regroup [laughs], but at one point we did have to go, “Wait, is he really going to rape me?” His story line was that he had once witnessed me having an affair with his father, and the only solution he had discovered, with his horrible therapist, to purge this was to sleep with me. He was so good. Oh my God! He just blew us away.

Q: Why are we fascinated by watching despicable people on reality shows?LK: Because we can’t believe our eyes. Maybe it’s just a window into my soul, but sometimes you see something that makes you so mad, and you’d like to say something, but you don’t. And then you see these people on these shows doing it, and it makes you feel better that you did keep it to yourself. You’re grateful to your parents for raising you better than that.

Q: Do you think reality-type shows will always be with us, or will the pendulum swing back to scripted shows?LK: That’s a good question. Game shows and contests have never gone away. I’m nervous for the biographical reality shows because what’s next? The actual Colosseum where people are killing each other? I don’t know what other level it can go to.

Q: You’re doing a biographical show with Who Do You Think You Are?LK: That’s more like a documentary series than a reality series. They call it alternative reality because they think no one will want to watch documentaries.

Q: You traced your own genealogy for one episode. You knew that some of your family had been lost in the Holocaust—what did you find out that you didn’t know?LK: Since I was a kid I had seen documentaries about the Holocaust, and I read what I could about it. I watched World at War—remember that series? They had a number of episodes on the Holocaust. There was some pretty graphic stuff in there. I took a lot of Jewish history classes and studied Hebrew for two years in college. But the striking thing to me is that while I studied it, I never applied it to my own family history. So I didn’t have to be burdened with the nightmare of what happened to people I knew. Then as I got older my grandmother told me it was Hitler who killed everybody in her family, and that’s the first time I came face-to-face with it. In my fully denial state of mind it was, “No, no, we’re not part of the Holocaust.” But I learned we are.